Coming from a sport like volleyball, season and off-season dictate the way and what you train and what the intensity is (simply put). I guess that some of you are training for a competition (or attend at several competitions throughout the year) so they will train differently in preparation for a competition and after it. Are powerlifters and bodybuilders training differently at that time (the influence of bulking and cutting in bodybuilding for example)?And what about people who are just training for the sake of it? Do they (just) use the implemented phases in a programme like 5/3/1? Are they planning different training-cycles themselves?

So... to summerize it... I would like to collect the different possibilities of periodization in Strength Training in this thread and I´m also interested in examples how you are doing it. Are you, for example, a powerlifter or bodybuilder and are you training for competitions? And if you don`t train for competitions at all, how do you use periodization in your training?

Periodization is any planned variation in training stress. So the answer to your first several questions is "yes".

So, it's a pretty broad topic. Some people have given names to different methods, but often the names are confusing, and people sometimes use the same name for different approaches.

Something as simple as alternating light days/heavy days is periodization.

A popular approach is to do cycles of different emphasis, like Lou Schuler's books suggest--several weeks of strength emphasis, followed by endurance or hypertrophy, etc.

Matt Zito uses an interesting approach which I haven't seen suggested elsewhere. He has 4 workouts but lifts on a MWF schedule, so workout A comes up on Monday, then the next week workout D is on Monday, and so on. Monday is always his heavy day, Wednesday light and Friday medium (as I recall). That way, the main lift of each of the 4 workouts comes up for heavy lifting once in 4 weeks.

Some will just cycle the rep-set scheme, maybe lifting 4x3 for 4 weeks, then switching to 3x12 for 4 weeks.

I have used this for some lifts: In one cycle I'll lift 6-10 singles at 90% of 1RM or of a recent relative max. Next cycle 5-7 doubles at the same weight, then next cycle 4-5 triples at the same weight, then 4th cycle either a deload or just add 5 or 10 pounds and repeat the pattern.

_________________Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.--Francis Chan

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